


Seventeen

by lettersfromnowhere



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, F/M, Fluff with a Sad Ending, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:35:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27218743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lettersfromnowhere/pseuds/lettersfromnowhere
Summary: She doesn’t see what a cloud of cicadas at graduation has to do with luck, but she listens.“These guys only come out every seventeen years,” he says, throwing a curious glance over at Suki to see if she’s listening. He smiles to himself, even though her expression is still blankly annoyed. “They’ve been underground since…well, pretty much since we were born. Crazy, right?”Or: a girl desperate to run, a boy who wants to stay, and one cicada summer to decide where their happiness lies.
Relationships: Sokka/Suki (Avatar)
Comments: 22
Kudos: 42





	Seventeen

**Author's Note:**

> A note on cicadas: they’re insects that live primarily underground. Certain species only come out to the surface every seventeen years and they are Loud. That’s basically it.
> 
> The title of this could refer to a lot of things: their age (they could be seventeen or eighteen, but I prefer it if they’re seventeen because it syncs up nicely with the timeline), the cicada life cycle, and the...you’ll see. Make of it what you will. It was supposed to be called “Tong Hua,” after a song that sort of fits its plot, but that got scrapped. Then it was “Seventeen” or “Cicada Summer,” and I went with the former because number fics make everyone cry. Please enjoy. :)

**June 3 rd**

“We’re pretty lucky to be seeing this.”

Suki’s about five seconds from shoving in her earbuds to drown out the infuriating buzz that fills the air around them, but she stops short at the open wonder in Sokka’s voice. An entire stadium full of celebrating students and families below them should draw her eye, but instead, she cocks her head in his direction, almost too intrigued to be annoyed. “Oh?”

She doesn’t see what a cloud of cicadas at graduation has to do with luck, but she listens.

“These guys only come out every seventeen years,” he says, throwing a curious glance over at Suki to see if she’s listening. He smiles to himself, even though her expression is still blankly annoyed. “They’ve been underground since…well, pretty much since we were born. Crazy, right?”

“Do they have to be so loud?” Suki complains, but she’s smiling, too, now. It’s hard not to get swept up in his enthusiasm at least a little bit.

“Wouldn’t you be loud when you woke up if you’d been sleeping in the dirt for seventeen years?”

“I have been. It’s called the public school system,” Suki deadpans, and his answering laugh is almost enough to jar her from her annoyance. It is hot and loud and muggy, and she feels like she’s going to dissolve into a cloud of steam in her stifling polyester gown, but she can’t help but smile when Sokka flicks at the tassel on her cap.

“Not anymore,” he teases.

“Not anymore.”

  
Those two words kick up sandstorms and bee swarms and a less-than-pleasant tingling sensation in her stomach, and she fights to ignore them. Today, she reminds herself, is _good._ Today, she’s free. And in only a few months, she’ll be out of this tiny, stifling town.

(She looks over at Sokka, gazing out over the football stadium that’s still full of people and off into the middle distance, and she’s not sure if that’s as exciting as it was six months ago anymore.)

* * *

**June 5 th**

The guests have nearly all trickled out by now; the few that remain linger back in the house, talking to Sokka’s family. The ladies from his Gran-Gran’s bridge club (Suki has no earthly clue what bridge is, and by now she’s too afraid to ask) mingle over the kitchen island, picking through leftover food and gossiping; from their place in the front yard, Suki can hear Katara, Aang, and Zuko shouting indignantly out by the pool as Toph cheats them relentlessly at whatever game they’re playing. But most of the people who’d dropped by to celebrate Sokka’s graduation are gone, and though they’re not alone, Suki can’t help but feel as if the world contains no one but the two of them.

“Do you ever wonder how many of these people you’re going to lose touch with?” Sokka asks, shifting so that the ridges on top of his car don’t poke into his spine. “You know…from high school?” his hand brushes hers – perhaps by accident, perhaps not. “Or…just from here, in general?”

“What do you mean, ‘from here’?” Suki asks, as if she doesn’t already know exactly what he means. Whether it was intentional or not, she returns the brush of hands, and her heart seizes when he locks his pinkie through hers.

“When you leave,” Sokka elaborates. “You know. Like you’ve been saying you were going to do since you were a kid.”

“Oh. Right.” She swallows hard. “Um…I mean, maybe not my classmates, but I hope I don’t forget _everyone,_ you know?”

“I thought that was the goal. Leave it all behind, you know?”

“It isn’t,” Suki says. “It never was.”

“Well, that’s news to me.” Now, Sokka unlatches his pinkie and takes her entire hand in his, and he laughs softly when her breath audibly catches. “This okay?”

“Uh, um. Yeah,” she stammers. “It’s…nice.”

“Really? I’ve always wanted to try that,” he says, his eyes crinkling at the edges.

“You have?” Suki props herself up on her elbow so she can look at him. “You mean, like…”

“Yeah. Like that.” He gives her hand a light squeeze. “You?”

“Um. Me too,” Suki admits, and even though it’s just about the most anticlimactic resolution to a six-year crush that she can imagine, she beams.

His eyes are wide when they finally meet hers. “Well, what do you know?” he mutters, and she laughs, inching closer and laying her head against his chest before she can think better of it.

“I know, right?” she says. He wraps an arm around her shoulders. Snuggling into the space that he makes for her and entirely unaware of the uncomfortable contours of the car’s roof against her back, she turns her gaze upwards. They don’t speak for a while, resting against each other with their eyes trained on the stars.

“You never answered my question,” Sokka says after a few moments.

“Of course I’m not going to forget this place,” she promises, because now she knows what he was asking her. “How could I?”

“I don’t know, Suki,” Sokka says, uncertainty bleeding into his words at the edges. “You’ve been talking about how much you want to get out of here since you were in middle school.”

“Well, yeah,” Suki admits, because she can’t deny it. It’s always been her goal: get out, go to college in the city, build a life out where there’s nothing to keep her from becoming…whatever or _who_ ever it is she wants to be. “But that doesn’t mean I hate it here.”

“But you’re not happy, Suki.” A breeze pushes a lock of her hair into her face, and he brushes it back behind her ear. “Anyone can see that.” 

“I’m happy with _you,”_ she demurs. It’s true, if inconveniently so.

What rotten luck it is, she thinks, to find that the person who makes you happiest and the place which makes you most miserable are a package deal.

“Really?”

She nods against his shoulder. “What do you think got me through high school?”

“And middle school, and elementary school,” he teases. Suki lightly punches his arm. “ _What?_ It’s true!”

“To answer your question,” she admits, too frazzled to think of anything better to say, “no, I’m not going to lose touch with you.” She takes a deep, centering breath. “I might forget every other minute of my stupid life in this stupid town, maybe, but not you. Never you.”

“I didn’t ask about me, Suki. I’m not the only person you care about here.”

Suki thinks of their friends and her grandmother Kyoshi, who took her in at seven when her parents died and has tried so hard to make life bearable in a town she’d never wanted to move to, and she feels almost guilty for thinking so much more of him than of them.

But, in the end, she finds it hard to think of anything else in this moment, lying in his arms on top of the sixteen-year-old Honda he saved a year’s worth of Shake Stop wages to buy when he turned sixteen.

“Not them, either,” she concedes.

“See that?” Sokka says as he points to a pattern of stars she can barely make out, diverting the subject the way he knows Suki wants him to. “Up there?”

“Um. Is that supposed to be the Big Dipper?”

“No, it’s the Fishtail. See how it sorta looks like-“

“The tail of a fish, yes, I got that.”

“Okay.” Sokka traces the pattern with his finger. “Do you see it?”

“Yeah, I see it.”

“Good.” He takes her hand and uses her finger to trace the outline of the constellation instead of his own. “I bet you’ll be able to see it out at college.”

“If the light pollution doesn’t get to it first,” she jokes.

“Still. It’ll be there.” He sets her palm back where it had previously rested against his waist. “I want you to promise me something.”

“I don’t know if I’m in a position to make promises, Sokka.”

“Then you don’t have to,” he says. “But can I at least ask?”

“Okay.”

“Every so often, look up,” he says, his voice almost cracking. Suki realizes with a chill that he might cry, and she hates the thought that she might be the cause. “Find the Fishtail and just…remember that I’m out there, too.”

“Sokka…”

“I know it’s stupid. Trust me, I know. But-“

“Sokka, that’s not what I meant.” She sits up, tucking her knees to her chest. “It’s just…how could you ever think that I’d just forget you like that? After all this time?” Suki bites back a lump in her throat. “You’re never going to be irrelevant to me.”

He sits up, too. “So do you promise?”

“I promise,” she murmurs, and their eyes lock on each other for one fleeting, eternal moment before they’re both bridging the distance between them and Sokka’s lips are on hers.

“Just in case you ever think I might forget,” Suki says when she pulls away.

(She knows that’s going to get her kissed, and though it isn’t why she says the words, it doesn’t hurt.)

* * *

**June 21 st**

Feet in the murky water off the end of the dock, fireworks bursting overhead, and Sokka’s arm around her shoulders, Suki can’t remember a moment when this town has felt more like home. It’s an annual tradition, the fireworks that kick off the county fair as much as they’re meant to usher in the new season, but she’s never liked it quite so much as she does tonight.

“You’re staring,” she says, breaking the companionable silence when she catches him, out of the corner of her eye, with his gaze trained on her. She digs her elbow into his side. “Dude. Watch the fireworks.”

“Nah, I’m good,” he replies, watching her face as she turns it up to the sky.

“Sap,” she mutters, but she kisses him for his trouble.

(She misses the finale of the fireworks show.  
  
This does not bother her.)

* * *

**July 1 st**

“Did you just say _deep-fried butter?”_ Suki’s eyes widen. “Just… _why?”_

“It’th delithiuth!” Sokka insists through a mouthful of the stuff. Katara and Suki cross their arms in tandem, sharing an incredulous look.

“Personally, I think the cheeseburger on a donut is better,” Toph cuts in. “It’s a heart-attack sandwich! What’s not to like?”

“I don’t understand how any of you are still alive,” Katara mutters, taking a bite of a deep-fried oreo without a hint of irony.

“Worth it,” Sokka says, grabbing a napkin from a nearby dispenser to clean excess butter off of his face. “Truly the pinnacle of human ingenuity.”

Suki rolls her eyes. “I don’t even see how that would taste good, but all right.” She pats his arm affectionately right as Aang returns to the group with what looks to be a grilled cheese sandwich the size of a dinner plate.

“It just does,” he says solemnly.

“I’ll take your word for it.”

She’s found herself taking his word for a lot of things these days.

* * *

**July 15 th**

These summer storms are the thing she’s going to miss most when she goes away. They roll in without warning, and she has only a few minutes after she notices the sky begin to darken to scramble for the screen porch (well, Sokka’s, more often than not). But once she’s there, she can sit on a worn porch rocker as it sways in the wind and watch the rain fall in furious sheets. Lightning breaks up the grey every few moments, and as she holds a jacket tight around her shoulders against the wind, she feels…

Safe.

Maybe that’s why she longs for the rush of city life: she’s always felt safest in the midst of a storm.

“Hey, Suki?” Sokka asks from the other side of the rocker. Ever since she came here, she’s been fascinated by these late-summer thunderstorms, and he knows better than to interrupt her fascinated rapture.

“Yeah?” Suki repliws, distracted.

“Are you going to miss this?”

She isn’t sure whether he’s talking about the weather or their… _whatever_ this is, but either one makes her swallow a lump in her throat. “You know I will.”

“Well, you’ll be back, right?”

She nods weakly, entirely unconvinced. “Sure.”

“That’s all right.” He knows she doesn’t mean it. “I’d never want to keep you here, you know that, right?”

The statement as he phrased it is a bald-faced lie and they both know it. Sokka wants nothing more than for her to stay, go to the nearby college that he’s attending on a track scholarship, let things continue as they are and have always been.

But he won’t. This place has only ever been an exile for Suki. Her parents’ deaths took her from the city she loved as a little girl, and she’s had her eyes on the horizon, waiting to return, for nearly as long as she’s lived here. He hasn’t admitted it, but he loves this girl who never asked for the life that led her to him, and he knows that he cannot ask her to stay. 

“It isn’t you.” That is the most honest Suki has been in weeks. “If it were, I’d stay in a heartbeat.”

He doesn’t have anything to say to that, so they watch the rain fall, and the shiver that wracks Suki’s shoulders has nothing to do with the chill in the air.

* * *

**August 1 st**

Non-boring dates are hard to come by in a town of two thousand, and with the county fair gone, there’s little to do but lounge on Suki’s sofa and watch whatever serialized sitcom or cheesy alien flick happens to grace the airwaves with its mediocrity that day. Two weeks before she leaves, she’s doing just that.

She’s half-watching a car commercial on a channel whose number she doesn’t recognize when Sokka calls from the kitchen. He’s rummaging for snacks, and by the time she’s called back her snack preference, the commercials have ended and the channel’s playing what seems to be some sort of musical. She recognizes it after a few seconds. _Grease._ Great. Probably the remake, if the overly-slick look of the film means anything.

“Summer lovin’, had me a blast,” sings…whoever…on the screen, and Suki abruptly hits the “off” button on the remote.

If Sokka notices her morose expression when he returns with a half-eaten carton of ice cream, he doesn’t mention it.

* * *

**August 15 th**

Her car is packed, and really, this should feel final. It isn’t as if she hasn’t been preparing herself for this since the day her acceptance letter arrive.

But she hadn’t counted on having someone to miss. She’d taken great pains _not_ to, really. Six years without a word about her feelings for Sokka was meant to protect her. She didn’t plan to go off to college in a sweatshirt two sizes too big, emblazoned with the logo of his university instead of hers.

But, as he holds her tight at the end of her driveway, Suki realizes that she was prepared for absolutely nothing, in the end.

“Fishtail, right?”

“Fishtail,” she responds, already choked-up. “I promise.”

She climbs into the backseat and props herself up on her elbows so she can watch, as they leave. And she doesn’t take her eyes off of him, standing in her driveway, until he disappears in the distance.

* * *

**September 26 th**

She doesn’t know what makes her do it, but she takes a grainy photo of the Fishtail constellation from the fire escape one night. She sends it to Sokka without a word of context.

_I miss you,_ she replies, and she wonders how long she can keep this up.

* * *

**November 10 th**

She meets him in the library the week before school lets out for winter recess.

Part of her feels guilty for even entertaining the thought when she and Sokka never truly broke things off. They never defined the relationship in the first place, after all – there was little to do but grow distant and eventually come to the realization that they were nothing but memories to one another.

So she does not text him, though he gave Suki his number that day in the library. She makes every effort not to come home; she stays with a friend whose parents live just outside the city for the break. Her grandmother is disappointed, but she is resigned with Suki tells her that she won’t be visiting - she’s always known how desperate her granddaughter is to run from the place she was raised.

She meets him again, entirely coincidentally, at a party that her roommates drag her to, and she lets him kiss her when the clock strikes midnight.

(There is no trust, no connection, certainly no _love_ in that kiss, and she misses those things – misses being kissed with the care and tenderness of someone who _knew_ her.

But she has made her choice.)

* * *

**June 3 rd**

**Seventeen Years Later**

It is the cicadas, of all things, that finally compel Suki to return.

“These guys only come out of the ground every seventeen years,” she says, and five-year-old Mirai’s eyes widen.

“That’s older than me!” Mirai squawks indignantly, turning wide eyes on her mother. “Why are they so _old?”_

“I don’t know, sweetie.” Suki laughs, though it comes out wan. “Why don’t you ask them?”

Mirai crouches on the ground, her tiny hands fearlessly plunging into the horde of cicadas at the base of the tree they stand in front of. “Hey! Come back here!” she cries as the insects continually evade her clumsy efforts to grab at them. “I wanna know why you’re old!”

Suki’s too absorbed in watching Mirai to notice the approach of footsteps behind her, but she does, when they’re close, and she whirls around.

“Suki?”

She’d recognize that voice anywhere, after any number of years. “Sokka,” she says, unsure what else to say.

“Seventeen years, huh?”

“Seventeen years.”

A full cicada cycle. She hasn’t seen him since this generation’s ancestors swarmed their town and they were more than cautious acquaintances.

There are a million things she wants to ask him, but she sees the way his face falls when he catches sight of Mirai and she looks back at him through her mother’s blue eyes.

“Mirai,” she says, swallowing hard. “My daughter.”

“She looks like you.”

“I know she does.”

She hasn’t looked for a fish’s tail in the night sky in years, but she knows in that moment that he’s looked up every single night.


End file.
